‘REALLY INTELLIGENT GIRL’ | Eight-year-old Spanish actress Sofia Otero poses with her “Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance” trophy at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday. (Agence France-Presse)
BERLIN — Eight-year-old Spanish girl Sofia Otero on Saturday won the best acting prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for her role as a nine-year-old boy who considers herself a girl.
Collecting the gender-neutral prize for her performance in the drama “20,000 Species of Bees,” about a boy in the throes of an identity transition, Otero fought back tears, later telling journalists that she was “very happy” to have won.
“I want to dedicate my life to acting,” she said.
“Bees” is the feature debut of Spanish director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, who said it was important for her to pick a girl to play the role and not a boy.
“It is easier for her. She’s a really intelligent girl,” Solaguren said.
Germany’s Culture Minister Claudia Roth singled out Otero for her “deeply moving portrayal of a trans child.”
The film “is a passionate plea against discrimination and for tolerance, openness, and equality, especially through Sofia Otero’s interpretation,” said Roth.
Gender, identity issues
Meanwhile, the prize for best supporting performance was awarded to Austrian transgender actress Thea Ehre for “Till the End of the Night.”
The movie, by German filmmaker Christoph Hochhaeusler, is a love story between a gay police officer and a transgender person against the backdrop of an investigation into a drug dealer.
Picking up the prize, Ehre had a special message for her parents: “Thanks for supporting me, for always [giving] me the space to be what I wanted.”
Gender and identity issues were the focus of several films awarded at the festival on Saturday.
American actress and jury chief Kristen Stewart described this year’s festival as a “boundary-pushing [event which] offers us the opportunity to be expansive in how we define those things, how we value works of art, how we categorize them.”
Stewart, at 32 the youngest president in the festival’s history, said the jury had been asking themselves all week “what makes a movie a movie.”
She said the jury had set aside “invisible parameters,” because “when you focus too much on what something is, you tend to lose track of what it does.”
The festival, which ranks alongside Cannes and Venice as among Europe’s top cinema showcases, also marked the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and highlighted antigovernment protests in Iran with new feature films and documentaries.